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Monday, June 11, 2012

Adults only announcement on energy

It is with
great sadness that I have to make an announcement. The solar and wind energy
dream is over.

It is my
responsibility to make this announcement because nobody else can.

The last time
I felt like this was when I had to fess up to my children that there is no
Santa Claus – it was always just me and your mum. Those nasty kids at school
who teased you for believing, I’m afraid, where right all along. “I’m really
sorry honey for not telling you earlier, but I didn’t have the heart. You so
wanted to believe it’s true.”

It’s the same
with society’s love affair with solar and wind energy.

All the major
energy corporations of the world have known this for a long time. But whenever
they try to say it they just become the “nasty kids at school”. Saying hurtful
things like: “Solar is the energy of the future – and always will be.”

All the
politicians who have known this for some time can’t say it, because if they did
you wouldn’t believe them and they would just be voted out of office. As the
global financial crisis bites our politicians are trying to quietly creep away
from all the grandiose solar promises they made.

The major
institutional investment firms that underwrite the energy industry have known,
but why should they tell, it’s none of their business. They just go on
investing our pension funds in fossil fuels like they always have.

This doesn’t
mean to say that we won’t see wind turbines or solar panels anymore, we will.
Wind and solar is beautiful, clean energy and we should use as much as we can
afford. But it’s time we realised it is not the panacea for the imperative problems
facing civilization today.

Wind and
solar will always be to energy what bicycles are to transport.

It all has to
do with one word – capacity. Those mentioned above – and engineers everywhere –
understand the importance of this word. But the rest of us in the egosphere are
easily confused by it.

For example,
I can ride my bicycle down a steep hill at probably 100 kilometres an hour (60
miles per hour). So the speed capacity of my bike is 100kmh. But that doesn’t
mean that I can ride my bike 100 kilometres in one hour. In fact I don’t think
I could ride 100 kilometres in a week.

A little motorbike,
on the other hand, that has a top speed of 100kmh, has the same speed capacity
as my bike. However, it could feasibly travel 100 kilometres in one hour.

My bike and a
motorbike can have the same speed capacity – 100kmh – but very different
“capacity ratios”.

Over any 100
kilometre stretch the capacity ratio of me on my bike – that is the percentage
of the journey I could do at my speed capacity of 100kmh – would be about 1 to
2 percent provided there were some really steep downhills. Whereas the capacity
ratio of the motorbike would be closer to 100 percent.

A
100kmh-capacity bicycle is not the equivalent of a 100kmh motorbike, and for the
same reasons a 100 megawatt windfarm is not the same as a 100 megawatt gas
turbine.

Bicycle
technology keeps getting better. Today’s bicycles are significantly faster and
lighter than bikes 20 years ago. In
fact, bike speed capacity has reached 220kmh (Eric Barone, downhill on snow, in
2000). But this doesn’t mean that it’s only a matter of time before bicycles
will be competing in the motorcycle Grand Prix.

In the same way wind and solar
technology is getting better and better, but, sadly, it will never be competing
with fossil fuels.

Politicians have long been playing
to delusions about energy promising to deliver a “clean energy future” based on
renewable energy. Here in Australia we have one of the, if not the, most conducive
environments for solar energy.

Politicians here have no problem
getting the public, journalists and even academics to believe we are about to
switch over to a “Solar Dawn” any day soon – a “Clean Energy Future”.

But in its current Draft
Energy White Paper it gazes into a crystal ball to model what we could have
in the year 2050. The best it could dream up for solar is 3 percent of our
electricity by 2050. Three percent, and only if there are some technology
breakthroughs.

I’m really sorry kids, but there
you have it.

The competition in the motorcycle
market is between names like Ducati, Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha. There will never
be bicycles competing here.

Competing in the power generation
market is coal, gas and nuclear. Right now there is no viable alternative. There
will never be wind and solar in this league. There is some renewable energy
making a marginal contribution, but this is almost entirely hydroelectricity
and biomass, essentially wood-fired power generation.

Yes, there will have to be a new
energy frontier sometime. But there is no way of predicting what that will be
or when. In the meantime we have to work with what we’ve got. Wind and solar
are not new energy sources for the future – they’re old energy sources. They have
both been around longer than bicycles and we have tried so hard, particularly
in the past 30 years, to make them work. But they just can’t do it.

Once again, it really saddens me to
have to announce that this dream is over. And the ones I feel the most for are the Greens.

I know how
much of their platform relies on, particularly, their solar energy vision, and
I hate to have to tell them that the big corporations – those “nasty kids in
the playground” – were right all along. There is no Santa and there is no solar
energy future.

So why am I
doing this? Why am I bursting their balloon?

Because I am
a big admirer of the Greens and the environmental movement as a whole. I have
been voting Greens for as long as Australian Governments have been throwing
refugees into jail.

As far as I’m
concerned, the Greens are the only party with a grown-up approach to the many social
issues that are important to me. I want to see them adopt this same grown-up
approach to energy.

We face some
very serious energy challenges today and solar dreamers are poisoning the
debates and preventing the discussions we really need to have.

The Greens
have been a powerful political force in Germany since 1980. Germany has adopted
one of the most aggressive attempts to make solar power generation work. It has
spent billions over the years and yet today it only gets about 1 percent
of its electricity from solar.

Greens have
done a lot over the years to improve our environment and raise environmental
awareness. Now we need them championing rational approaches to the huge problem
of supplying the world’s growing need for real energy while, at the same time, reducing
our emissions.

About Me

Leonard McDonnell is a writer (pronounced 'righter'). Wherever he sees wrong, he tries to make it right - by writing.
He has been a journalist for over 30 years. He has worked for The Sun News Pictorial, The Herald, The Age and The Sunday Age in Melbourne. He was a columnist for the Sunday Sun and the Herald Sun’s first Weekend Features Editor. Today he is a freelance journalist and speech writer specialising in the energy industry.
His book, "Siamo Dio: The Cuckoo's Egg" is available on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F4WWY4I